A few questiosn about encoding

[Grant Edwards]

On 2013-06-15, Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:58:20 +0300, Nick the Gr33k wrote:
>
>> On 14/6/2013 1:14 ????, Cameron Simpson wrote:
>>> Normally a character in a b'...' item represents the byte value
>>> matching the character's Unicode ordinal value.
>
>> The only thing that i didn't understood is this line.
>> First please tell me what is a byte value
>
> Seriously? You don't understand the term byte? And you're the support 
> desk for a webhosting company?

Well, we haven't had this thread for a week or so...

There is some ambiguity in the term "byte".  It used to mean the
smallest addressable unit of memory (which varied in the past -- at
one point, both 20 and 60 bit "bytes" were common).  These days the
smallest addressable unit of memory is almost always 8 bits on desktop
and embedded processors (but often not on DSPs).  That's why when IEEE
stadards want to refer to an 8-bit chunk of data they use the term
"octet".

:)